Darkspore Review

Darkspore is the latest title from the creative minds at Maxis, sans Will Wright. As you can expect from the title, the game utilises the company's Spore creation engine as we saw in its namesake back in 2008.

Now the only elements of the original title is the creature creator, even then you are limited in what sections of the 100-plus pre-created avatars you may change. This is no bad thing believe me, while the option to create your own avatar of death would be appealing, the sheer number of creatures available to you should ensure that there will be someone to complement the play style of everyone.

The storyline for this title for title goes a little something like this.

"After the discovery of Exponential DNA (E-DNA), the Crogenitor race were at the fore-front of scientific research. E-DNA had the ability to take any mundane organism and increase all it's attributes exponentially, creating near perfect sentinent beings. Unfortunately E-DNA has escaped the lab into the wrong hands and allowed the evolution of the Darkspore to overrun all planetary life. After eons of hiding in hypersleep, you have been awakened with a mission: Reconstruct an arsenal of Genetic Heroes and destroy the Darkspore!."

Sound confusing? Well it baffled us but it sets the tone for quite the surprise hit. Darkspore follows the vein of games such as Diablo and Torchlight in the form of being a "hack & slash" title. However, instead of being some persistant/random generated dungeon, you play through stand-alone levels, taking out fairly generic monsters for the chance of loot. At the end of a level you get the chance to take that current level reward or gamble everything for the chance of even better equipment by launching straight into the next level. Be warned though, if you fail that level then you lose your previous reward and the chance of the better loot from that current level.

This shift in action-rpg perspective removes the need for character grinding and pushes the focus clearly on the action element of the game, in which Darkspore truly shines.

To break from the traditional vein of action-rpg games, you level up your Crogenitor level rather than your individual avatars. This Crogenitor level allows you to access the more powerful units to apply to your squad. Speaking of squads, instead of running with one single character through the game you actually have a squad of three available to you which you can call into battle instantly during play, however the composition of your squad may only be changed on the Crogenitor vessel you reside upon.

Each of these units will fall under one of five different classifications. Plasma, Bio, Necro, Quantum and Cyber. These classes will determine what style of character the avatar will be, additionally you have three more roles which the avatars may be gifted with, damage, healing and tanking. The start of each level will display what classifications you will face, if your squad composition contains a class match then they will be at a disadvantage and take double damage from that matched enemy class.

This places a further strategic element in your squad choice to cover a wide range of possible encounters, thankfully you generally only face two types of enemy class on levels. While initially you may feel that the set levels have placed limited playability to the title, Darkspore interestingly has added two additional difficulty levels to the single player campaign which are only accessed once the previous difficulty level has been completed. This gives you extra scope to run through for loot to augment your character's abilities. Furthermore all of the campaign can be played with up to three friends in co-operative play or via the in-game match making system.

This four player mode is definitely the most enjoyable and rewarding experience we found with Darkspore. Assigning roles to people to ensure we had a balanced group composition where possible made the game fulfilling while still remaining very challenging on the higher difficulty levels. Having one using a tank class, a couple of damage dealers while the last one healed gave us flexibility when encountering most mobs. When things got tough, the games ability to hot swap characters in your squad allowed us to quickly adapt to the current encounter.

The fun does not stop there, Maxis have also included a PvP component to the game, which unlocks at Crogenitor level 10, comprises of 1v1 or 2v2 based arena style play. You take your chosen squad into battle to attempt to eliminate your opponents squad. Now while 1v1 PvP is a lot of fun, its 2v2 where the real action is, complementing your team-mate and unleashing devastating combos in order to gain the upper hand. You can compete in ranked matches or just choose an unranked arena for practice or for that quick fight without any real pressure to win

It is apparent that Maxis have created something that will be a solid component of any PC gamer's collection, the polish and developer support for the title firmly points towards quite the hit. While Spore tried to explore new horizons and experimented, the well trodden and familiar path Darkspore is walking will make the game the more fondly remembered title.